Tips and Tricks For Web Development – Some Useful Tools!

We are by-and-large, Mac users but most of these tools are cross platform and available on Windows and Linux with the exception of CSSEdit.

Netbeans. This is a fantastic IDE and when used with Xdebug it provides a superb PHP development environment with line-by-line debugging and all that the competition (Zend Studio) offers but it’s free!. BTW we are fans of Zend Studio just not the price tag!

This brings us onto Xdebug. This is a great php module/addon that when used with Netbeans provided great debugging facilities.

CVSDude. What’s that dude? CVSDude.com! this is a really great SVN hosting solution. We tried running our own SVN we tried other SVN providers and finally started using CVSDude for our Subversion Requirements. Most developers will know how important SVN is for team collaboration and without SVN it’s pretty much impossible to collaborate with a team working on a large project. CVSDude offer a cost effective SVN project hosting solution with many extras such as integrated Trac and Bugzilla. Support is great and it can all be managed via their web-based console.

SyncroSVNClient So this brings us onto Subversion clients, there’s allot out there but our favorite is SyncroSVNClient, easy to use, cost effective and reliable.

Safari and Web Inspector . We have experience of Firefox and Firebug and these are excellent tools but if you are a JS developer and have a Mac take a look at Safari’s JS debugger. On our Macs we found it took much less memory resources than Firebug and offers syntax highlighting in the JS code than makes it easier to ready and instantly see bugs in the code. While Firefox and Firebug do a great job Safari and Web Inspector do a top notch job at JS debugging. To enable the Safari Develop menu and Web Inspector, just close Safari and type (or copy/paste) the following command into Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities): defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true.

CSSEdit . Unfortunately only available on the Mac CSSEdit is a top notch CSS tool. Firebug for Firefox and Safari Web Inspector do a great job of CSS debugging class inspection and style over-riding so they are great for finding a CSS issue. However a tool we have found priceless on many occasions is CSSEdit by MacRabbit. This CSS editor allows you to browse any styles and override these much the same as FB and Web Inspector but with much more ease. The controls and interface are easy to use. New style attributes can be easily defined by using the GUI without the need to remember the syntax or have to go off hunting for a sample on Google. More information can be found here: http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/.

We hope this information helps!

There are many development tools out there and it’s never a case of one tool does all but our collection of tools certainly seem to be pretty definitive for building a large web-based application.